For those who are unfamiliar with Pandora, it’s a revolutionary personalized internet radio service that helps you find new music based on your old and current favorites. Users enter a song or artist that they enjoy, and the service responds by playing selections that are musically similar. Users provide feedback on approval or disapproval — which Pandora takes into account for future selections.

What are the current methods of discovery for new porn? You have to click and browse, click and browse, and constantly repeat this intriguing yet unnecessary process. Instead, I want an application to constantly serve up porn that neatly aligns with my fetishes. I’ll give each video or picture a thumbs-up or thumbs-down, and the algorithm would adapt to my ratings.

Where is the revenue model? Once you can whittle down to the user’s core fetishes, hit him with a laser-targeted advertisement. The probability of conversion just increased by 120% (a hypothetical but realistic number). Ask any adult webmaster and he’ll confidently tell you that niche porn sites make the most money.

A lawyer who specializes in the adult industry, Allan Gelbard, was present for the discussion. He recommended that producers should fight back using quick and forceful legal action against the websites that host stolen content.

Gelbard notes that it is important to maintain a database of offending websites while proceeding to send them legal notices to immediately take down the content in question. However, if Gelbard is suggesting that we do this manually, this is not a practical solution because every instance of stolen content is difficult (if not impossible) to keep track of because each spreads virally in all directions through various media.

Instead, the adult industry needs technology like Attributor to fight copyright infringement. Attributor constantly scans the internet to identify unauthorized websites that are stealing your content. You can tell Attributor which content to look out for and the bot will monitor the internet for new instances of your stolen content. Then, directly from the Attributor interface, you can send DMCA Takedown notices to those unauthorized websites.

Attributor is more than an advanced version of Copyscape. It also tracks photos and videos too, which is a critical feature for the adult industry.

A smart entrepreneur should create a service like Attributor that sifts through all the user-generated Porn 2.0 websites to look out for stolen content. Or maybe Attributor can lend its technology to create a specialized service just for porn.

There is an obvious problem with serving regular javascript-based contextual ads like AVN Ads on a porn tube website. How well can even the most powerful advertisement engine guess the context of the page with a minimal amount of text as it is on a tube page? So what ends up being displayed on most porn tube sites and porn video blogs is usually limited to the following:

• Site-targeted ads on the eCPM model
• Irrelevant text or banner ads
• Settle for less with Adult Friend Finder or similar dating ads

However, if the Revver embedded contextual ad model is implemented in porn tube sites, it would allow webmasters or advertisers to target their ads to relevant videos that would equal higher-quality click-through traffic. The designated text ads are rotated within the video while it’s playing. For instance, I could advertise a text ad for “Hot MILF Porn” within a hardcore amateur MILF video that would get many interested clicks looking for more similar content.

In addition, embedded contextual ads within the frame of the video itself are much more eye catching than something that lies outside of the scope of attention along the skirts of the website. Advertisement is all about placement, and the Google Adsense system has proven that nothing is better than being embedded within the content itself.

Even with these impressive metrics to show, YouPorn’s creator Stephen Paul Jones isn’t kidding when he says that he doesn’t know what to do with all the traffic. Porn tubes are difficult to monetize because the profit model is solely based on advertisement revenue. That’s the catch for creating a portal of user-generated or pirated content. Some sites are trying to fight this limitation by incorporating dating, DVD, and sponsored content (going the legal way).

The emerging trend of porn tube sites is not a matter of porn becoming “2.0″ because now it becomes a profitability issue. Porn will never reach the “2.0″ phase if tube sites continue to steal copyrighted content from the studios who create it and, along with it, offer free content which removes the incentive of money from webmasters by cutting subscriptions. Where would the adult industry be without fresh content being pumped daily through the system by studios and webmasters?

Ironically, porn tubes are not just affecting the profit margins of content producers but also of themselves. The cost of bandwidth to support the massive traffic is overwhelming the relatively less-than-impressive revenue from the ads. You can try to strategically place the CPC ads as best as you can on these tube sites, but they will not persuade the web-savvy or disinterested visitors to click on them. This explains why one of the top porn tubes Redtube is for sale and GEXO is changing its business model.

GEXO no longer offers private locks on user-uploaded videos to store your personal porn collection online. We learned that GEXO cannot afford the tremendous amount of bandwidth and storage costs to offer what is simply a nifty feature. Furthermore, videos from sponsors like VideosZ and Bang Bros are now being emphasized because they are of predictable length (3-5 minutes) and they offer a stream of affiliate revenue. The lesson here: Web 2.0 is all nice and fun, but it’s all about the money, baby.

So will porn tubes never reach their full potential until bandwidth and storage become a mass commodity? Cheaper information technology is a certainty in the near future, but by then the wind may have already blown by for the tube phenomenon.